Category Archives: discrimination

A lot of feminists have a bee in their bonnets about the hashtag campaign “not all men,” on the grounds that it detracts attention from the conversation asserting that men cause certain problems, and because, as they argue, exceptions don’t disprove the rule.

I suppose I’m glad that there are folks out there who at least acknowledge that ALL men aren’t responsible for the ills caused by some, but I maintain that #NotAllMen, far from being a distraction from a more important conversation, isn’t good enough at absolving men as a group from blame for social ills. “Not all men” still implies that a significant enough proportion of men behave in these ways (oppressive, sexually aggressive, violent, etc.) to discuss it as a male behaviour in the first place. The overwhelming majority of men do not do these things. This would be like rebutting the racist statement “black people steal!” with “not ALL black people steal!” This rebuttal would be questioned on the grounds that most black people don’t steal, and describing stealing as a black behaviour at all (rather than a human behaviour that anyone can engage in) is still racist.

#NotAllMen isn’t good enough because it still implicates men as a group, or the majority of men. It doesn’t communicate the reality that the group responsible for the problems described is not a significant proportion of men, but rather a tiny minority of people consisting of men and women, and it’s just as sexist to describe rape or violence as a male behaviour as it is racist to describe theft as a black behaviour, regardless of whether or not you acknowledge “exceptions.”

I suppose hashtag campaigns aren’t meant for clarity or nuance, but far closer to the truth would be something more like #ASmallProportionOfMenAndWomenAreViolentAndDangerousButMostPeopleSimplyArentLikeThatSoWhileWeShouldCertainlyAddressItWhenItDoesOccurYouCanStillGoAboutYourBusinessFeelingRelativelySafe. I know, it just don’t roll off the tongue the same way.

So, while the above meme is clearly presenting the image of throwing a bone to men’s advocates and those who oppose the feminist narrative, it still manages to maintain the overt sexism of any claim that all men do engage in the aforementioned behaviours. OP is essentially saying that as long as she acknowledges that there is at least one man in the world who doesn’t, it’s okay to continue to describe men as a violent group whose behaviours justify fear, distrust, and hatred from women. This is like saying, “I acknowledge that SOME Jews aren’t greedy! I’m not an antisemite! I just want to address Jewish greed as a social problem!”

If you follow my posts, and if you read the studies I link to, by now you probably know that the vast majority of men aren’t violent toward women, and that the small proportion who are is comparable to the proportion of women who are violent toward men. I shouldn’t need to remind you that violence is not a male problem. It is a human problem, with perpetrators and victims on both sides.

Sure, all women have met a male asshole, but this is a disingenuous way to frame the phenomenon of assholery, let alone the phenomenon of violence. All people have met assholes of both sexes. The existence of male assholes says no more or less about maleness or men as a group than the existence of female assholes says about femaleness or women as a group, just as the existence of some number of Mexican rapists in no way justifies Donald Trump’s implication that this behaviour characterizes the Mexican people.

By now, over the course of my blog, I’ve probably repeated most of these points ad nauseam, so I want to talk about another problem related to the debate between the #NotAllMen folks and the #YesAllWomen folks.

“All women” is a ridiculous claim. This meme and a truly astounding number of people I’ve spoken to assert with a straight face that most or all women have had experiences with individual men that caused and justified fear. I’ve written atlength about the popular and horrendously inflated violence numbers that are peddled to us by the media. The wildest of these is the infamous “one in three” statistic, followed closely by the “one in five” statistic, whose studies suffer from severe definitional skewing, double standards applied to classification of men and women who perpetrate or are victimized, sensational reporting, focus on unreliable lifetime data, biased or small samples, poorly worded survey questions, and a number of other methodological problems and biases. But even if we take the highest and most skewed statistic, 1 in 3, at face value, this still falls remarkably short of “all women,” or even “most women.”

This is important, because there is a very popular narrative that male bad behaviour toward women — everything from disrespect to discrimination to violence — is institutionalized, culturally acceptable, and ubiquitous. Women are taught that they should be afraid of passing strangers, that they should be cautious when men approach them or are in the same spaces as them. We’re taught that strangers want to hurt us, that there are gatekeepers throughout education, business, and academia who seek to prevent us from success.

We are taught to expect men to hurt us, even though the majority of men won’t hurt anyone, and the majority of women won’t be hurt. We are taught to expect to be paid less for the same work, even though apples-to-apples comparisons show that in much of the country the truth is the opposite. We are told to expect discrimination against us that harms our careers, even though only ten percent of women, according to Pew Research, believe they have ever had a negative impact on their career due to gender discrimination, and even though some studies indicate that many women enjoy discrimination in their favour in the workplace. We are taught that we live in a culture that condones violence against women, even though the reverse is closer to the truth. We are taught that the criminal justice and social work systems will treat us with disbelief and ridicule if we try to report violence victimization, even though these systems are so dedicated to protecting women from men that it routinely treats male victims as perpetrators, and even though we lock away enough innocent men that one small organization has already identified and exonerated hundreds based on pre-existing DNA evidence alone. We are setting women up with expectations of harms they are unlikely to encounter, and this itself harms women.

We have been taught to be paranoid in public spaces, on edge with male friends, suspicious around potential male partners, and to feel a complete lack of bargaining power with male employers and coworkers. We are teaching our young people to live in fear, and I have met many women who have swallowed this narrative wholesale, who are very much afraid. This alone is a crime against women. There is no good reason to be afraid of an entire demographic of people, and I think we can all agree that part of a good life is being able to relax and enjoy your time, rather than being hyper-alert and fearful of others.

When I see this false narrative repeated over and over, and I see the number of women who believe it so wholeheartedly that they are desperately upset, I can’t help but wonder:

How many women are raped, assaulted, or discriminated against, and do nothing about it? How many don’t report it, don’t go to the police, don’t talk to HR, and don’t try to seek help because they assume that what happened to them is so common and culturally supported that no one will help them? We are teaching young women not only to be afraid of others, but to believe that there is no recourse for them if they are actually victimized. Would you report your rape or domestic assault victimization to the police if you thought they’d blame you for it? Would you talk to HR about sexual harassment or discrimination if you thought they supported it? This BJS study shows that many women don’t, and that the proportion is growing of female victims of sexual assault who have this fear of the system. From 1994 to 2010 the proportion of female victims who did not report due to the belief that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t help them increased from 8% to around 15%, almost doubling. I imagine it is no coincidence that this increase seems to have coincided with an increase in the prevalence of activists claiming that we live in a culture that accepts or condones victimization of women, and that police and social workers routinely blame and shame women who report, claims for which in ten years of research and dedication to these topics I have found not the remotest shred of substantiation.

These toxic misconceptions aren’t just harming women’s ability to comfortably move through the world. We are teaching women an ideology that, if believed, will cripple their ability to seek help if something terrible happens to them. What a horrible thing to do to women. This narrative of all men, or most men, all women, or most women, needs to be dismantled and set on fire, not just because of the flagrant misandry that underpins it, but also because of what it does to the quality of life of the women who believe it.

The fact that the harm done to women by this fear mongering and rampant misinformation isn’t a major feminist issue alone makes me highly suspicious of the feminist movement.

While discussing issues surrounding sexuality and gender I encounter a great many conversations affirming the idea that we live in a rape culture, a society that excuses, normalizes, or even condones particularly male perpetrated sexual violence toward women and girls. Considering today’s third wave intersectional feminism, which declares itself diverse and inclusive of people of all colours, shapes, sexual orientations, and a wide variety of gender identities, I find it interesting that I still keep encountering this simplistic, exclusionary, unilateral understanding of violence and violence acceptance: it is women who are raped, men who do the raping, and this specific gendered practice which society does not take seriously enough.

As a female survivor of male assault and an anti-violence activist, I’m more than familiar with the public and private responses to any experience like mine: an automatic outpouring of empathy for the female survivor and pitchfork-wielding anger directed toward that person’s male attacker. I’ve seen this time and again with little variance, no matter where I go, no matter my audience, to the extent that I would be genuinely shocked if I stumbled upon anyone who blamed me or dismissed my account of those events.

This, of course, is good news, but I have struggled in vain to find that same compassion and understanding for my many acquaintances and loved ones who have suffered the same or worse, but are male or whose assailants were female, who I am regularly told don’t exist, don’t matter, or are unfortunate but not part of the “real” or “larger” problem we need to address (never mind the way I’m dismissed when I tell of my experiences at the hands of other women). If you’ve read my blog before, you know that my thesis on the subject of rape culture is that it is victims outside this male-on-female model, including LGBT individuals, but especially male victims of any kind, who are widely swept under the rug, neglected, blamed, and mistreated when they are raped. To illustrate my point perhaps more succinctly than I have in the past, here is a simple pop culture comparison.

In 2012 multiple Steubenville high school football players took egregious advantage of a female peer while she was passed out drunk at a party. There were members of the district staff who were aware of the incident but kept quiet, and some even attempted to cover it up. When the story broke, the American people were quite justifiably in a blind rage about this, calling for the heads of the rapists, coaches, and district. Two boys and a staff member were convicted and sentenced. Many other staff were forced to resign and charged, and these events even allowed other cases to be uncovered and addressed within the same district, which appeared to have covered up other assaults, as well as cases of child abuse.

This story is frequently held up as an example of rape culture, despite the outrage expressed by pretty much everyone at the events, despite the fact that most of those involved have been held criminally responsible in accordance with due process, and those who weren’t have lost their jobs, status, and reputation. In this culture where it is supposedly normal and acceptable to rape women, rapists were tried and convicted along with those who enabled them, and everyone’s reputation was smeared across the country in a sensational news story among echoing cries for castration and death.

In 2015 Brock Turner took advantage of a female peer while she was passed out drunk. The two men who discovered and helped her were hailed as the heroes they are. The rapist plead guilty, was convicted, and was sentenced, though his sentence was abnormally light, offensively lenient. When the story broke, the American people were, again very justifiably, foaming-at-the-mouth angry. They called for the heads of the rapist and the judge who sentenced him. When Turner was released from prison there was another wave of outrage as the public was reminded of him and his callous crime, solidifying his name in history as synonymous with a host of ugly and well deserved pejoratives.

Like the previous case, this story is considered a quintessential example of rape culture, despite the outrage it sparked in every corner of the country. It has been widely used to argue that rapists get off easy due to a lack of public interest in punishing them, even though there are currently over 15,000 people incarcerated in federal prisons for sex crimes, even though the average sentence for convicted rapists is about 10 years, not the three months young Brock got away with serving. Turner’s fate is in no way typical for his crime, even less a consequence of his gender, especially when you consider how much more leniently female rapists are treated under the law. It’s overwhelmingly apparent that it was the wealth and influence of Turner’s family that got him off easy, not his sex. And yet this case is iconic in the conversation surrounding the theory of rape culture, used to promote the idea that the American people are okay with women getting raped and don’t care if rapists are punished.

However, in stark contrast to these news reports, a year prior to the events of People v. Turner actress and comedian Amy Schumer gave a speech at the Gloria Awards and Gala. She detailed a story from her college days in which she, sober as a judge, took advantage of a male peer who was so drunk that he couldn’t stay conscious. The line “Is it still considered head if the guy falls asleep every three seconds?” stands out in my mind. And this wasn’t an apologetic admission of guilt, either. This speech was an empowerment story, a brag about how she used a mentally and physically incapacitated person to regain her confidence in her body and her sexuality.

And this time, there were no torches, no pitchforks, no public outcry at all. There was no court case, and no judge held accountable by the people to give a proper and deserved sentence. In fact, there was applause. Social media was ablaze with an outpouring of love and appreciation for Schumer, and she was hailed across liberal news outlets as courageous, empowering, and feminist. She was praised for this speech on Huffpost, Gawker, Bustle, Vulture, and the Washington Post, to name just a few.

Amy Schumer committed exactly the same crime that earned the likes of Brock Turner national vitriolic outrage, and yet the few journalists who tried to point out that her actions even constituted rape were largely ignored or dismissed. There’s even an article entitled “No, Amy Schumer did not give a speech celebrating how she raped a guy,” in which the author blames Schumer’s victim on the grounds that he drunkenly initiated some acts (conspicuously ignoring the fact that Schumer painstakingly described him as being so wasted that he was not himself, had little motor function to speak of, and that he repeatedly lost consciousness during the encounter), and even suggested not-so-subtly that he was the one taking advantage of her due to her dissatisfaction with the experience in the moment.

If either of the women in the above criminal cases had initiated their encounter before passing out, would that have made the men involved not rapists? Would those men have become her victims, rather than the other way around, had they reported feeling uncertain, disappointed, or disgusted by her drunkenness while they raped her? Is there any conceivable excuse by which their actions would not still have been universally and emphatically condemned? Is there any conceivable order of events in which Brock Turner or Ma’lik Richmond would have been praised for penetrating a drunk, unconscious woman? Imagine feminist pundits and journalists, members of a movement whose platform is largely centered around its opposition to sexual violence, hailing those men for their courage had they told their stories on a stage with the goal of empowering men.

No. The difference is clear: Amy Schumer, a woman, is celebrated for raping a man, while men who are caught committing such acts against women are met with conviction, prison time, and the uncensored hatred of every American who reads the news.

So tell me, which gender’s rapists are widely condoned, excused, or swept under the rug? Who is most often told they are asking for it? Who is blamed for their victimization? Who is ignored, laughed at, or disbelieved? If any national news story is to be held up as an example of rape culture, it is the story of Amy Schumer’s speech, in which she brags publicly and unabashedly in front of cameras about raping a young man, and is met with congratulations, in which anyone who objects to her actions is dismissed as hyperbolic or confused, in which the national conversation about rape and the way it’s addressed continues to exclude female perpetrators and male victims because they are generally believed to not exist or not to merit discussion. This is what rape culture looks like.

Don’t misunderstand me. I have no doubt that there are cases in which women are mistreated by the criminal justice system while attempting to report victimization. I’m sure that there are places where women have been disbelieved or told they shouldn’t have been drinking, however patently condemned this practice is by the overwhelming majority of our society. My argument that this sort of treatment is not considered acceptable and is not ubiquitous should not be taken as an ethical statement excusing it. Officials who actually do behave this way should be exposed and punished.

But everyone is aware that women can be, and sometimes are, the victims of sexual assault. Law enforcement and social workers are trained to anticipate female victims of male assailants, and to believe and assist the woman accordingly. Everyone is horrified when male rapists appear in the news, especially when they fail to be properly punished. (Of course, if more women were aware of this, rather than buying into the narrative that they will be disbelieved and blamed by the public and the criminal justice system alike, more women would probably be willing to report.)

But further, male rapists do appear in the news, earning those news stations hoards of outraged viewers. They don’t get laughed off as unusual or silly. Unlike men, women are not assumed to always want sex; their gender and sexuality are not treated as indicators of blanket consent. Men and boys are taught to be respectful and that one of the worst things they can do is take advantage of a woman, while girls get no such lesson. Unlike men, women who say no are not called homophobic slurs or considered less of a woman. Male perpetrators are not celebrated or represented as a comedy trope. Women aren’t laughed at when they try to report, nor are they told there’s no such thing as a female rape victim or that they ought to be happy they got laid. No one hi-fives them or calls them lucky. Female victims are immediately met with compassion when they reveal themselves as such to any audience; they don’t have to seek out small online communities within a fringe human rights movement to find someone, anyone, who is willing to give them empathy and understanding for their suffering.

The majority of the neglected, ignored, and blamed rape victims are male. If you’re going to discuss rape culture, you wouldn’t just be remiss, you’d be neglecting the bulk of the problem if you didn’t address the way we respond to male victims and female rapists.

I haven’t mentioned this much here, but I talk all the time about misconceptions people hold concerning privilege. Privilege isn’t a binary. A group that suffers a disadvantage in one arena may enjoy an advantage somewhere else. The problem with the assumption that it’s a binary is that it’s used to make assumptions about people and dismiss their experiences. This is one of the reasons I (and other egalitarians and MRAs) face so much pushback and friction when we discuss men’s issues. Men are assumed to be the ones at the top of the hierarchy, always benefiting and always doing better than women, often at the expense of women, so when men and their supporters try to address issues that affect them, it’s often dismissed or even derided. I’ve talked at length about the disadvantages men face when they are victims of violence, largely due to the fact that they are perceived as the perpetrators of violence. But let’s consider some of the other consequences of this perception.

An interesting tactic I’ve seen occasionally in anti-feminism and men’s rights is to illustrate the bias and bigotry in certain parts of feminist ideology and its adherents by replacing any use of the word “men” with “black people” in tweets and arguments.

Some examples:

“Men are the greatest threats to women and children. Saying #NotAllMen is just a way to deflect the blame.”

“I hate #NotAllMen. All men have seen other men harass women. Stop saying #NotAllMen and do something about it! #YesAllWomen”

“If men get upset by #KillAllMen, then maybe they could start by stopping raping, abusing, and murdering us?”

Just make a few simple changes…

“Black people are the greatest threats to women and children. Saying #NotAllBlacks is just a way to deflect the blame.”

“I hate #NotAllBlacks. All blacks have seen other blacks harass whites. Stop saying #NotAllBlacks and do something about it! #YesAllWhites”

“If black people get upset by #KillAllBlacks, then maybe they could start by stopping raping, abusing, and murdering us?”

And Presto! We have easily recognizable hate speech. This is a handy little litmus test for sexism. Is it a bigoted thing to say about black people? Then it’s a bigoted thing to say about anyone. This is useful because most reasonable people experience an immediate, visceral discomfort at the sight of blatant racism. Even re-writing those tweets with the racial edits made me compulsively look over my shoulder, and I’m sitting at my kitchen table. This reaction is so instinctive and immediate (for anyone who isn’t an asshole) that it’s hard to disagree when it’s used to point out the bigotry in a statement.

These all come from actual tweets, by the way, which are justified, presumably, by the belief that men as a group are, in fact, violent or oppressive. Sure, these are extreme examples, and you could easily write off the women responsible for these statements as hateful idiots (and they surely are) who don’t necessarily represent anyone or anything, but the perception of men as violent is as pervasive as it is damaging, and blatantly evident in women’s distrust of men (which I flesh out a lot more in my piece on sexuality and my piece on violence). At first, this little litmus test was merely amusing to me, and I applauded it for its efficacy, but then I started thinking about what parallels actually exist between our perception and demonization of racial minorities as violent or criminal, its effect on real people’s lives and livelihoods, and the similar stereotypes and assumptions we hold about men. After all, a great deal of women’s behaviours and perceptions are influenced by the assumption that men are violent or potentially dangerous, and as I’ve addressed many times, this perception does inform both policy and culture.

Let’s start by considering a couple scenarios. This first one comes straight out of Karen Straughan’s blog (sorry, Karen, if you ever read this, but it was such a fantastic example that I couldn’t pass it up): Imagine I’m a woman walking down the street at night. I’m headed home, I’m alone, it’s late, and suddenly I notice a man walking behind me. Now I’m a little uncomfortable. Maybe I feel a bit more wary, or even unsafe.

This is common experience. Women are often uncomfortable in the presence of strange men, especially when they are otherwise alone, because they are aware of a potential for danger. Many men are so aware of this fear that they will cross the street or change their route out of respect for the woman, not wanting her to feel afraid that he is following her or planning to rob or hurt her.

Here’s another scenario: This time, imagine I’m a woman at a bar. I’m sitting at a table drinking when a man I don’t know approaches me and starts to talk to me. I find myself maintaining an arm’s length between me and the guy and keeping a much closer watch on my drink.

In the first example, you may have nodded along, having remembered times when you’ve been that woman, uncomfortable at night on a sidewalk. Maybe you weren’t having the conscious thought “he’s a man, and men are bad, so he might hurt me,” but you were aware that sometimes men hurt women, and that sounds like a pretty reasonable cause to be uncomfortable. And in the second example, many reasonable women would be wary of their safety and their drinks around strangers, and some women would tell you that this is due to the fact that sometimes men are sexually aggressive or violent toward women. Again, at face value, this sounds rational, not hateful or biased. It is true that sometimes men hurt women. That’s a fact. But let’s go back to that litmus test for a moment.

What if I were to tell you that I was walking home alone last night, and felt uncomfortable because I noticed a black person walking behind me? Say I was walking for a while, hoping that black person would cross the street so that I could feel more safe, but they didn’t, so I eventually just took my turn a couple streets early. What? I’m not being racist. Sometimes black people rob white people. It’s a fact, that’s all.

And maybe I was walking home from the bar. Maybe at that bar someone came up to me while I was drinking. I felt the need to keep physical distance from them and careful watch on my drink because that black person was a total stranger, and sometimes black people are sexually aggressive or violent toward white people. Just look at Bill Cosby.

Yikes. I felt uncomfortable writing that just now. Did you feel kind of gross reading it? When we make statements like these about someone based on race, they are apparent in their bigotry and fallacy. Nobody would doubt my flagrant racism if I actually said those things to people, and I’d probably be corrected or criticized. If I said them in public I’d probably also be the sort of person who flies confederate flags and asserts that everyone should speak American. But when we make them about men, suddenly we are just women looking out for ourselves, and that inherent judgment is not even questioned. Making the judgment that someone is violent or means to harm you based on their sex is no better than making such a judgment based on their skin colour, and those assumptions can lead to real-world consequences.

For the record, I’m not advocating against watching your drink in a bar or paying attention to your surroundings on the street. I’m merely pointing out the bias when we do so based on gender, when we assume we are less safe because we have cast a certain group of people as the default predators. Just as most black people aren’t robbers, most men aren’t rapists, and assuming otherwise is playing into harmful and discriminatory stereotypes. Go ahead and keep an eye on your drink – that’s practical – but do it around everyone, not just one race or gender.

Maybe you’re not convinced that this comparison is fair. Maybe you see it as somehow different. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Well what’s the harm? Racial minorities are disadvantaged and mistreated by the system. There are institutionalized systemic biases that affect them. It isn’t the same to say these things about a specific race, because they aren’t in a position of privilege, like men, that we are attempting to dismantle with this type of language.”

It’s funny you mention that, because I did a bit of research. Remember what I said about privilege and binaries?

What are some of the things we point to as evidence that some races suffer systemic discrimination? What are some trends that are cited as disadvantages people suffer on the basis of race?

For the purposes of the following barrage of statistics, consider these demographics: Men make up about 49% of the U.S. population, women 51%, white people 62%, and black people 13%. I focus specifically on these four demographics because some of the studies I found are not more specific in their delineation of race, and also because no reasonable person will argue with the assertion that black people suffer systemic discrimination and other well documented disadvantages compared to caucasians.

So let’s start with poverty, since that’s usually the first thing we point to when we’re talking about social disadvantage. According to a 2010 fact sheet published by SAMHSA, men make up about 62% of the sheltered homeless. A prior study cited within the publication placed that number between 67-80%. For comparison, the percent of homeless people who are black is listed as 37%, just slightly lower than the percent who are white (40.1%). Both men and black people suffer gross over representation in the homeless population, with men constituting as much as 4/5.

And when you talk about poverty, you’ve got to look at education. The most recent relevant Common Core dataon high school graduation rates (2008-9) demonstrates a gender disparity of about 7% (73.4% for males, 80.6% females), and a racial disparity of about 18% (63.6% for black students, 81.8% for whites). And those disparities hold true, and more extreme, in post-secondary education. About 41% of college graduates from associate to doctorate level (in 2009-10) were male, 11% of graduates were black, and 71% white. Obviously the gender disparity here is less pronounced than the racial one, but it exists at every level, within every permutation. An interesting relevant fact is that the dreaded wage gap is beginning to reverse. Young, unmarried women are starting to out-earn their male counterparts (particularly in cities) by a national average of 8%. In some cities, that number climbs to as much as 21%. Could this be influenced by men’s dropping graduation rates? Perhaps many of these young men and women are the recent graduates (or non-graduates) of that post-secondary trend entering the work force.

Or how about violence victimization? I had to do some digging at the Bureau of Justice Statistics to make these comparisons (hence the inconsistency in the types of statistics), but men suffer violent crime at a rate of about 1.2%, versus women’s 1.1%, whites’ 1.1%, and blacks’ 1.3% (as of 2013). This is a slight over representation in terms of both gender and race, but let’s focus on a few more specific types of crime. If you examine violent victimization by a stranger (2010), men are nearly twice as likely as women to be victimized, at a rate of about 9.5 per thousand. Black people suffer these types of crimes at a rate of 13.3 per thousand, white people at 9.2. But homicide is the kicker (this time from the census). As of 2008, 48% of victims were black, 49% white, and all of 78% were male. Now that’s a disparity.

But wait, there’s more! Why don’t we take a look at the criminal justice system. Most conscientious people agree that black Americans suffer unfair treatment at the hands of law enforcement and the courts. After all, they are given on average 23% higher sentences than white people for the same crimes, were 28% of arrests in 2011, constitute 37.5% of the prison population, and are generally treated more harshly by law enforcement. This is such a widespread and serious problem that it has led to protests, extensive discussion about policy and corruption, and violent riots.

So you may be interested to know that men are given, on average, 63% higher sentences than women, are 74% of arrests, and make up 93% of the prison population. Men suffer a sentencing disparity that is nearly three times as much as the racial disparity, and are the overwhelming majority of American prisoners. In addition to receiving 63% harsher sentences for the same crime, men suffer a further bias: that same study, conducted by law professor Sonja Starr of the University of Michigan in 2012, found that women are significantly more likely than men to avoid charges and avoid conviction, as well as being twice as likely to avoid incarceration when they are convicted. When comparing equivalent crimes, criminal histories, and other relevant factors, men are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged when arrested, more likely to be convicted when charged, more likely to be incarcerated when convicted, and more likely to face a harsher sentence when incarcerated. For exactly the same crimes. And we wonder why almost all prisoners are male.

But it doesn’t stop there. In 2008, the BJS conducted a study of police-public contact. Police interactions with the public were analyzed from that year. This analysis more than hints at what we already know about police tendency to single out or be harsher toward people of certain races. While they found that black people had been stopped while driving only at a slightly higher rate than white people (8.8% vs. 8.4%), they were arrested at a traffic stop at a rate of 4.7% (compared with 2.4% of whites), had their vehicles searched at a rate of 12.3% (compared with 3.9%), and experienced a threat or use of force at a rate of 3.4% (versus 1.2%).

Now, according to that same analysis, men were stopped at a rate of 10% (versus women’s 7%), arrested at a stop at a rate of 3.5% (versus 1.4%), had their vehicles searched at a rate of 7.4% (versus 1.6%), and experienced threat or use of force at a rate of 1.8% (versus 1%). For those of you keeping count at home, some of these numbers show a significantly greater disparity than the racial one above. And remember that most of the instances of racial police brutality have targeted males, not females. In fact, according to BJS data, cited in an article about race and police shootings, less than 5% of arrest related deaths between 2003 and 2009 were female. For comparison, about a third were black (while the article doesn’t consider this a dramatic number, remember that this is nearly three times the percent of black representation in the population as a whole).

Bear in mind that most of these links come from organizations that rely on the Duluth model (indeed, the BJS states outright in some of the studies linked above that its statistics on sexual violence apply only to victimization of women and girls), so if there is bias between the lines, it is not likely to be in my favour. And yet, all these studies have demonstrated pretty conclusively that disparities in violent crime victimization, education, homelessness, arrest, incarceration, and treatment by law enforcement, all arenas capable of ruining lives or worse, follow similar patterns for gender as they do for race. Men suffer very much the same types of biases and discrepancies that we point to as evidence of a need to level the playing field for the races.

“But Jackalope!” you may be saying, “aren’t most of these gender disparities the result of male aggression and other cultural male behaviours? Can we really say they reflect an institutional discrimination against men?” To that, I’ll just go ahead and refer you back to my litmus test from earlier. You wouldn’t be saying “they bring it on themselves” or “they’re really just that violent” or “they don’t work as hard” if you knew I was about to replace every instance of your usage of “men” with “black people”.

It may be that men are, to an extent, more prone to crime than women due to some social or even biological factors, but our assumptions about men and violence, aided by the Duluth model which is entrenched in just about every institution we have to deal with violence, have led to a widespread bias in the very institutions we employ to identify, examine, and correct violence. Pervasive characterization of men as default perpetrators and criminals has led to men being treated as such, from basic police contact to arrest, to conviction, to sentencing, and I see no good reason to differentiate this from the way the cycle of bias against black Americans affects their treatment by the law. If the system treated men fairly, we wouldn’t see that 63% difference in sentencing for the same crimes (or the gaps in all the other steps of the process). And the chasm between our innate compassion for women and cavalier attitude about the suffering of men has certainly exacerbated this problem.

Most people are vaguely aware of some of these trends, but write them off as the result of male behaviours and culture. Isn’t most violence male-on-male? If men want to be better educated, more financially stable, less involved with criminal justice, less likely to be the victim of violence, and viewed in a more positive light on the whole, if men don’t want to suffer stigma and bias, they should be less violent, work harder, and dedicate their energies more toward educating and bettering themselves. But male culture doesn’t lend toward those things. If they behaved differently, if they had different priorities, they wouldn’t have these problems. If men want to be treated better, they should stop acting so darn masculine. But doesn’t that sound just a little familiar? I’ll let you apply that litmus test on your own if you need to.

So am I saying that being a man in the U.S. is exactly the same as being a racial minority? No, not exactly. Every group (indeed, every individual) has its own circumstances, advantages, and disadvantages. But most of the disparities we point to in order to illustrate institutionalized racial discrimination affect men, too, sometimes significantly moreso, as you read above. And yet nobody seems to be all that concerned with the institutionalized sexism in these arenas (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that it benefits women). Not only does nobody seem concerned, most still assume that men are in a position of unambiguous privilege

But even though women have a staggering advantage in these areas that would make Jezebel shit its collective pants if it were reversed, a quick google of “women and criminal justice” has turned up this total garbage, this propaganda-riddled study, and a slew of other articles and editorials that use statements directly contradicted by the statistics above, decrying the small rate of incarceration women do experience, casting women as the victims (what else is new?) of criminal justice bias and mistreatment, and urging for even greater leniency on behalf of women. These articles vie for leniency by arguing that many women are driven to crime by desperate circumstances, have a history of trauma, addiction, or mental illness, or are mothers who shouldn’t be separated from their children. But they don’t seem to consider the fact that many male criminals are also driven to crime by desperate circumstances, have a history of trauma, addiction, or mental illness, or are fathers. Why are these arguments only being made about women? Since the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the highest prison population, why aren’t these arguments being made as an effort to limit the millions of citizens funneled into our prison system as a whole, instead of focusing just on the extreme minority of women incarcerated?

In fact, this directory of assistance programs has the nerve to exist, and appear on the first page of results, in order to aid women (yes, specifically women) who have been incarcerated to reenter the civilian world. By all means, let’s focus on the 7% of prisoners who aren’t male with hundreds of maddeningly specialized programs nationwide (California alone has 23, and Wisconsin has 10, to give you an idea) which funnel money, time, and effort into helping the proportion of the incarcerated population that may even need it the least. It’s pretty clear where the public priority lies. Can you imagine if these articles and programs existed specifically for the aid and defense of white people?

Finding the comparisons I listed above took me more than a day of poring over reams of data and digging through many organizations’ publications, none of which were particularly easy to find, and most of which didn’t even have the information I was looking for. This wasn’t a simple Google search of “systemic biases against men”. (In fact, when I did search that, Google provided me with links about racial discrimination instead.) So why isn’t this forward in the gender equality discussion? Why does everyone still think men are privileged and women are disadvantaged, period? Not only are there no riots or protests about this, no #MaleLivesMatter, and no public outcry. It’s barely discussed at all, while similar trends for a different group are practically provoking a sociopolitical revolution. And rightly so, since people are having their lives ruined and lost as a result. Those are some very real, tangible, tragic social consequences that can be traced pretty neatly back to stereotypes and unfair perception of a group as violent and criminal. But when the same information applies to men, it’s suddenly on the back burner. This could be one of the most pressing gender equality issues of our time, so why is nobody talking about this? I guess catcalling and manspreading are just that much more important.